Usually, clinical facilities comprise of a lot of different clinical departments. For a patient's treatment, typically, an inter-departmental workflow is thus necessary, as different clinical entities have to interact with each other and a clinical workflow between different clinical departments is a very complex task. Therefore, there is a high potential for decreasing cost and increasing quality by improving efficiency of this workflow. The interface between specific departments can benefit very much from intelligent computerized interface systems. Particularly, the radiology department and the central laboratory (shortly: lab) show interdependencies for which an interfacing workflow could be ameliorated with respect to efficiency and also with respect to other parameters, like cost aspects.
In a typical clinical workflow, nowadays, during an initial patient investigation a physician develops a first hypothesis for a possible diagnosis and needs further data in order to support his hypothesis. The strategy in most cases is to start with relatively cheap methods, for example with IVD tests (in vitro diagnostic tests) and to escalate to more expensive methods, for example magnet resonance imaging or the like in a later phase of the diagnostic process.
Typically, the physician orders a set of lab parameters to test his hypothesis. Subsequently, the test is going to be executed in order to gather the lab parameters for the physician. Then, the physician receives the result with the lab parameters and analyzes whether or not this result may confirm his hypothesis. In case that his hypothesis might be confirmed and he needs to have further data, the physician might escalate the workflow in order to get subsequent IVD tests or to initiate diagnostic imaging for gathering more information. In case that his hypothesis might not be confirmed, he has to formulate a new hypothesis and he possibly orders a new set of lab parameters. In this case, subsequently another lab test will be ordered and started.
The above mentioned procedure is time-consuming and error-prone, since the lab tests might be initiated iteratively and a sequence of testing and analyzing is necessary. Therefore, in present systems it may take two or more days for a final clarification of a patients disease, because the initialization of each subsequent step within the clinical workflow requires a written consent of involved medical staff (physician, radiologist, laboratory personal, other specialist etc.).